


Ascension

by rnanqo



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Pre-Canon, Suicide, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream, ascension to lyctorhood, fancy party, handwavey about resurrection timeline stuff shhh, mercymorn can have little a fun as a treat, resurrection era, sneaky cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:40:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26783821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rnanqo/pseuds/rnanqo
Summary: Mercymorn is on the brink of cracking the ultimate necromantic theorem. She has no time for parties--unless it would delight her cavalier to go. And Mercymorn would do anything for Cristabel.
Relationships: Mercymorn the First/Cristabel Oct
Comments: 21
Kudos: 110





	Ascension

**Author's Note:**

> CW: suicide; nothing that isn't mentioned/implied in canon.

The invitation fluttered down from the upper gallery and landed on the desk, a skeletal hand withdrawing back into the shadows with delicacy. Mercymorn pried up the wax seal with one perfect fingernail.

**_HIS CELESTIAL KINDNESS, THE KING UNDYING_ **

begs

_MERCYMORN ETA_

and her cavalier _Cristabel Oct_

to come **_REVEL_**

this **_EVENING_**

at _**8** pm_

in the _CELEBRATION_ of—

—and here Mercy stopped reading. With the reverence due a missive from God—the Resurrector, the Necrolord Prime!—she laid it on top of her three splayed reference tomes and flattened it out before tearing it into confetti. Then she let her head thunk down onto her books, indulged in a single scream of frustration, composed herself, and headed out of the library.

The main foyer of Canaan House fairly sagged with swag and bunting. It was lousy with baubles and tinsel, echoing with the clatter of skeleton constructs doing decoration and setup. Mercy stalked through the hubbub, unnoticed.

Another party! Lord, why! And to celebrate what? Mercy did not know. Mercy had no time for parties. Mercy was a walking bundle of nerves and theorems. Mercy needed a nap and a hot meal. Mercy did _not_ need a social event. Mercy needed to synthesize the disparate philosophies ratcheting around her head into a glorious megatheorem—

“You’re muttering to yourself in the third person again,” Cristabel sang, twirling around a pillar.

Their quarters were awash in the golden light of Dominicus’ setting, giving the main parlor a burnished loveliness Mercy rarely got to see. She was in the library or the laboratories as often as she could swing it, hammering out the rules and theorems of the art of necromancy, digging toward a beautiful and universal truth. Lately she’d felt so close to it, so close to discovering the ultimate aim. She could see it in the other necromancers’ eyes too—they were all on the brink of something sublime.

But that was neither here nor there when there was a _party_ to attend. Obviously.

“You’re in a good mood,” Mercy said, folding her library cardigan and draping it over the back of a paisley armchair. “Was there a certain invitation slipped under the door?”

Cristabel giggled. “May have been. Did you also get this invitation?”

“May have.”

Cristabel’s face broke into a huge smile. “Does this mean we can go?”

“Of course,” Mercy said, smiling back in spite of herself.

Cristabel had been morose and muted these past couple of weeks, and it buoyed Mercy’s spirits to see a sparkle in her cavalier’s hazel eyes again. It was worth putting off her work for another night to have a bit of the usual Cristabel back again.

Her cavalier had clearly been plotting, and had flowing white dresses ready for them both. Mercy refused: she would look like a spoilt dairy product, and it was a bit gauche to match with one’s cavalier. Instead she chose a midnight-blue dress, not too attention-catching, but with a slit up the side “to show a bit of leg if you want,” in Cristabel’s words. Mercy did _not_ want, but it was better than the white. In the white, with her dark hair rippling down her back, Cristabel looked like an antique muse, or the manifestation of “aggressive health.” Next to her in the mirror, Mercy looked like the manifestation of “did an okay job dressing herself for a social event.”

They studied themselves in silence a moment, and then Cristabel turned and took Mercy’s face in both hands. “Promise me you’ll have fun tonight? Let go a little. You work so much.”

“I’m so close, Cris.” Mercy couldn’t quite look her in the eye. “I’m so close to figuring out what it all means.”

“Yes. I know that. And I’m so proud of you. _We’re_ so close, Mercy. We’ve come so far, and we’re almost there. I don’t want you to worry about anything tonight. No fussing over theorems, okay?”

Mercy could only nod.

“Promise me,” Cristabel said. “Live.”

And there was the cool brush of a kiss on her forehead.

“I promise,” Mercy whispered, and looked up again to find Cristabel gone. She was only across the room, looking for earrings, but Mercy felt a slight chill in her absence.

*

They met up with Augustine and Alfred, another necromancer/cavalier duo, in the grand hallway leading to the foyer. “See, it’s _not_ gauche to match with your cavalier,” said Cristabel, gesturing to the brothers’ matching grey suits. She hugged Alfred for a bit too long; Mercy exchanged a long-suffering look with Augustine. They disagreed about many things, but their cavaliers’ weird touchy friendship was something they could agree to hate together.

Music and chatter sounded faintly from the party, and Mercy felt herself clam up. She’d done this before. This wasn’t her first Canaan House party, nor even her tenth—they’d been here years at this point, locked in study and research and preparations for new House installations, with random parties to break up the monotony. It never got easier, though. She reached for Cristabel’s hand as they crossed into the foyer, and relaxed most of the way when Cristabel laced their fingers together and gave her an excited squeeze.

It wasn’t too bad, in the beginning. The four of them oohed and aahed over the ice sculpture in the centre of the room, toasted each other with little glasses of sparkling apricot wine, and listened politely to the odd, energetic music provided by a string quintet from the Fifth. Cyrus and Valancy came up and told some hilarious story about an eggplant that Mercy could not follow and frankly didn’t want to; and then somehow she wound up alone with Augustine, having to make bland small talk next to an unsettling piece of statuary. It was mostly, “The work you did on transference was certainly something,” and “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

Thankfully their cavaliers returned with a round of tiny rolled pastries topped with dots of green cream. The four of them touched them together in a toast and knocked them back at the same time, laughing. For a moment there when Augustine smiled, Mercy found herself actually liking him; but the moment passed quickly, thank the Lord. When their cavaliers disappeared again he tried to ditch her for a circle of glitterati from the Third, was roundly ignored, and returned to Mercy, making some snippy complaint about poseurs.

“Here, try these!” Cristabel and Alfred were at their sides again, with another round of canapés, this time crackers, topped with shining little dark red bites of what looked like steak tartare. They were both grinning too widely.

“You’ve had too much to drink,” Mercy said severely, but opened her mouth. Cristabel flew it in, making spaceship noises, and Mercy laughed so hard she could barely chew it.

It wasn’t a good canapé. She drained her own glass chasing the taste away, and reached for Augustine’s, but he held it away from her with his silly long arms. “There are literally skeletons walking around this whole place with things for you to drink. Go bother them.”

Feeling unaccountably hurt by that, Mercy took his suggestion and left. She went and had an argument with Cassiopeia about a core hyperossification theorem, and then Valancy dragged her over to a huge glass bowl of wet-looking spheres, pale green and orange mixed. Valancy said, “So John taught me this game—”

“Please do not call our Lord Resurrector _John_ ,” Mercy said, closing her eyes in weariness.

“—this game called Chubby Bunny,” said Valancy, who had no shame, “where you put as many things in your mouth as you can at once, and whoever gets the most wins!” She picked up a green sphere with a pair of fussy little tongs and dropped it in her mouth, then shoved the tongs into Mercy’s hand.

“What are these?” Mercy said, picking up an unappetizing moist orange sphere.

Valancy chortled. “Mem bah.”

“What?”

“ _Melon balls_.”

“Live a little, Mercymorn,” Mercy muttered to herself, and tipped her head back.

She stuffed as many melon balls into her mouth as she could, but Valancy beat her by a mile. Of course Valancy had a much bigger mouth; no hard feelings there. Then there was the problem of what to do with the mess of melon they’d stuffed into their mouths, since melon truly wasn’t a good fruit and didn’t deserve swallowing. The two of them snuck around to the back of the staircase to disgorge their quantities of melon into some potted ferns. “Fertilizer,” Valancy said, and clapped Mercy on the back in a way that jarred her teeth.

“Fertilizer,” Mercy agreed, and laughed. She was doing all right at this having-fun thing! For five minutes, at least, she had not thought about theorems. Oh, damn it, there she was thinking about theorems. But was it theorems? Did it count as thinking about theorems if you were really just thinking about thinking about th—

Cristabel crashed into her, hard, and Mercy was falling, but her cavalier swooped in with reflexes like a praying mantis and caught her before she tipped completely over. “Sorry, Mercy,” she was saying through fits of laughter, “that was supposed to be a hug, not an attack!”

“My darling, my angel,” Mercy said, “what’s this here?” She smoothed the neckline of Cristabel’s dress—there was a little lump under it, gauzy and soft, right over her heart. A bit of gauze, taped over her skin, barely noticeable, but for a bright bloom of blood spreading in the center of it.

Cristabel laughed and waved her off. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” And then Mercy thought she heard her say, “A surprise for you!” before she whirled off, but she was headed for Cyrus, and for all Mercy knew it was Cyrus, poor thing, the surprise was for.

Mercy hunted down another glass of the sparkling apricot stuff. Having fun wasn’t so bad, actually, after howevermanyshewanted glasses of wine. She talked to at least three people she’d never met before, and didn’t feel like melting into a puddle once. Of course she didn’t remember a thing about who they were; she was busy keeping an eye on her cavalier.

Cristabel and Alfred had hardly left each other’s sides. They whispered together, danced together, went to the buffet tables together. They did nothing suspicious, nothing Mercy would have to look away from—but there was a bizarre magnetism in the way they rotated around each other all night, like double suns. Mercy danced and talked and did all the things one did at parties, and wound up drowsing on a green velvet sofa next to Augustine. Again. “Don’t you have any other friends to talk to?” she said.

“I don’t like you implying that we’re friends.”

“You see that?” Mercy said, gesturing to their cavaliers, who were by the staircase doing something dangerously close to canoodling. “Fucking offensive.”

“I’ve seen it.” Augustine loosened his cravat, because he’d worn a stupid cravat, because of course he had.

“Someone should stop them,” Mercy groaned, but she made no move to get up from the couch.

“They’re a set at this point. Two cavaliers, bosom buddies. More-than-bosom buddies?”

“Don’t.”

“It’s not that strange. It was bound to happen. In fact, we could, ah, complete the square, if you were so inclined . . .”

He trailed off out of either modesty or innuendo; whatever it was, Mercy did _not_ like it, and turned upon him a glare that could kill a man. “How _dare_ you.”

His hands went up in surrender. “All right.”

“Unlike some people, I came here to unravel a sublime mystery.”

“And how’s that going for you?”

She made a face rather than answer, and he laughed.

“Much the same for me, Mercy. Much the same.”

Over by the staircase, Cristabel and Alfred had grown serious and silent, barely moving, just watching each other with some unfathomable intensity. The music from the string quintet had only gotten louder and stranger, the mood of the party wilder; but the two cavaliers stared at each other as though they were frozen in time.

Augustine leaned over. “You know they say that if you make eye contact with someone long enough, your only two options are to kill them or kiss them.”

“That’s it,” Mercy said. “I cannot stand this.”

Before she could get up, though, Cristabel’s lips moved with one unhearable word. Alfred gave a single quick nod, and then together they turned and raced up the grand staircase.

Mercy rose and followed them. Whatever they were going to do, she had some moral obligation to try and stop it. She couldn’t have any fun at a party whatsoever if Cristabel was making a fool of herself.

She lost them at the first-floor landing. They’d gone left, but the wide grand hallway was shadowed and silent. Then a laugh sounded from a partly open door. Mercy was about to fling it wide open, but Augustine caught her wrist; he’d been close on her heels and now held a finger to his lips, eyes wide. Did he want to spy? She made a disgusted face at him and flung the door open.

It was a dimly lit music room of some sort, thickly carpeted and hung with drapes. There were about three too many pianos. No one was touching, thank goodness. Alfred was sipping from a vial of clear liquid; he handed it to Cristabel and then turned around, wiping at his mouth, and froze. Cristabel, bright hazel eyes locked on Mercy’s, raised the vial in a toast and tipped it all down her throat.

The world tilted slightly off its axis.

“What is that?” Mercy said, going toward her with a dim sense that something was very very wrong. “What did you drink?”

Cristabel met her in the middle of the room and wrapped her in a hug. “I’m doing it for you,” she murmured into Mercy’s hair. “Don’t be mad.”

Normally Mercy melted into Cristabel’s hugs, but for some reason, this one made her heart speed up, made her shoulders tense. “I could never be mad at you,” Mercy said, clutching her close. “Not for anything, ever.”

Cristabel pulled back. She smiled, and her teeth were filmed over with blood. “Good.”

Mercy said, “But what—” and Cristabel collapsed. Mercy barely caught her, easing her down onto the carpet. “Cris. Cris _what did you do_?”

“The final piece.” Cristabel’s voice was cracked and fading. “We figured it out. One flesh, one end, Mercy. Once I’m gone, then you can complete the—all you have to do now is—is—"

Across the room, Augustine screamed. The noise barely pierced the fug of Mercy’s rising horror. She scrambled for her cavalier’s hand, took her head into her lap. “Cristabel, Cristabel Oct, stay with me, stay—” She found herself babbling her cavalier’s name, chanting it like a spell, a spell for Cristabel; and she reached out with her mind into the square of bloody gauze over Cristabel’s heart and tried to see what was wrong; but she wasn’t much of a flesh magician, never had been, and all the tissues felt the same even as there was a great disruption of them in a messy borehole down almost into her heart; and she couldn’t tell what she should knit back to what, nor even what theorem to start that with; and oh, why hadn’t she studied this? Why was she sitting here, useless to her own cavalier, unable to move, as her eyes leaked and her nose leaked and Cristabel’s hazel eyes gazed up at her, loving and serene and sure; and why hadn’t Cristabel _asked her_ before doing this, they told each other everything, they were practically one person—yes, one person, one flesh, one end, but not like this.

Not like this.

Mercy’s nails dug into Cristabel’s hand as something heavy tugged on her heart—and Mercy was no great flesh magician, but she was an excellent siphoner, _too good_ a siphoner, as her necromancy reached for Cristabel’s bright soul and seized it entirely. She tried to stop it, but it was not a thing that could be stopped; something in her stomach was drawing Cristabel into herself, and it _hurt_.

 _It’s okay_ , someone said in her mind, _it’s all right—_ and Mercy sobbed because it sounded like Cristabel, Cristabel whose lips were parting, a bubble of blood blooming between them, a last kiss for Mercy.

_Take me and let go._

Mercy’s arms slackened and the body slid to the carpet. Dark hair splayed round Cristabel’s lovely head like a halo. Mercy closed her eyes. Slowly she became aware of the room around her again, the oppressive silence of it, punctuated by quiet whimpers coming from behind her. Her stomach heaved and twisted, like she’d eaten something foul.

“You made me promise,” Mercy whispered. "How dare you."

There was no reply, not even in her head.

A low groan came from behind her. She looked over her shoulder, and there was Augustine, crouched over Alfred, their matching grey suits spattered with blood. He was shaking, and when he looked at Mercy his eyes were too wide and too hungry. They flickered, green-grey-green-grey-grey-green, and did not seem to see her there at all.

“Is this it?” Mercy said, half to herself, half to Augustine, half to Cristabel—that was three halves, but she was no longer quite one person any longer. She was more than—she was less than—she was worse—she was empty. Where was Cristabel? Nausea rose in her gut as her cavalier’s words from earlier rose up in her mind.

 _We’ve come so far. We’re almost there_. _Promise me. Live._

Was this _there_? Was this the pinnacle of necromantic achievement they had all been searching for?

When Mercy spoke again, her voice broke against the terrible hush of the room.

“Is this all there is?”

*

When she snapped back to reality, a week later, she was no longer herself. She was Mercymorn the First, Second Saint to serve the King Undying. The Resurrecting Lord, the Kindly Prince of Death, put his gentle hand on her shoulder and insisted, not for the first time, that she call him _John_. She shrugged it off and turned her face to the wall.

Without her cavalier, there wasn’t much to live for. But she had made a last promise to Cristabel, and she would keep it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
